Mottled
by LabyrinthDweller
Summary: Some time after leaving every reminder behind in Ashfield, Henry finds a small kitten underneath his car.
1. Mottled

_I might actually continue this - idly write a few chapters here and there as things go. There's probably not going to be an overarching plot, just incidents with Henry and his new roommate._

_Post SH4, Eileen's Death._

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**Mottled**

Henry unwrapped the damp bundle he had hurried into his apartment from the storm outside. The kitten mewled and wriggled its stubby paws in the free air. It was wet and dirty from where he found the poor thing underneath his car. Its pained squeaks caused him to look underneath until he found it huddled against a wheel. Figuring that it must've crawled there during his shift at work, Henry carefully picked it up and wrapped it in a towel before the rain started pouring. Now that it was here lying dazed on his kitchen floor he didn't know what to do.

He had moved away from Ashfield the first chance he had got once the nightmare was over and the serial killer was good and dead. At first he had moved back to Portland, giving himself a temporary release with his parents as he looked for apartments further and further away from Ashfield and Silent Hill. He found one, northeast of Portland into Washington state on the cusps of the temperate rainforests. That was where he was now, far from the horrific memories of South Ashfield Heights, Room 302, and his repeated failures to protect the ones he vowed to protect.

That being said, he had very few contacts here—less than he had had in Ashfield. At least with Ashfield it was close enough that he could give his parents a call if he needed something like, say, could you take care of this cat that I found underneath my car because I don't know what to do with it. He was fine with money but it was a paycheck-to-paycheck life and he didn't know if he could handle caring for a pet. Carefully helping the kitten to its feet, he rubbed its wet head, causing his fingers to become slightly muddy.

He was about to get a clean towel to help wash the rest of the mud away when he saw that the kitten was limping.

Henry opened the local phone book and dialed the veterinarian office. It was minutes away from closing, so he made his story quick. The woman on the other side asked him to see if he could figure out why the kitten was limping, so he gingerly turned it onto its back. It mewled in distress, waving its working paws but refusing the move its front left arm. Henry could see red, raw skin. Dabbing at it with a kleenex he confirmed on the phone that it was bloody. The woman sighed, and he could vaguely hear clicks of a mouse as she ran through appointment files. After telling him to come in first thing in the morning the next day she gave him gentle instructions for how to care for the kitten for now, telling him to make sure it didn't move much and definitely didn't try to jump anywhere.

He thanked her and hung up, watching as the kitten gave up wriggling and simply lied on its back, staring at him with alert green eyes. Wondering if it was simply stubbornly waiting for him to right it again or if it was avoiding righting itself due to pain, Henry called his superintendent.

She came up fifteen minutes later, a kindly, rarely intrusive woman living alone and approaching her fifties. Generally the tenants didn't keep pets unless they paid an extra fee, and after carefully petting the kitten she reminded Henry of this. Due to the injury the kitten had she gave him an ultimatum of a week to either find another owner, give it to the shelter, or sign the form to keep the cat here. She then left Henry and the kitten alone.

Plugging the sink and filling it with warm water, Henry gently lifted the kitten from the floor and into the small pool. Draining some water so it didn't have to struggled to keep its head above it, he gently began to bathe it with a clean washcloth. The water was tinged brown when he was done. He didn't have a blow dryer but he had a small space heater, and, using that instead, he placed the kitten on a bundle of blankets in front of it, making sure it didn't try to climb out and away. When it was warm and dry it perked up its head and mewled at him, sniffing the air curiously. It was dark-furred, mottled with various russet colors and deep browns.

Petting it though it flinched away from his hand, Henry left it sitting in front of the heater while he made a quick dash across the street, braving the rain to the small corner grocery store. Picking up kitten food the vet had suggested and grabbing a small meal for himself (he had almost forgotten that he needed to feed himself as well as the kitten) he returned to find it asleep on the blankets. Leaving a small dish out, Henry followed suit some hours later.

The next morning he scooped the kitten up in the blankets it had slept in, wary of the small blood spots as he took it back out to his car and drove to the vet's office.

"It's a girl," the vet had told him, "And she's relatively healthy. Looks like she was attacked though, probably wandered too close to a nest of some sort. The good news is that she's okay for now, the _bad_ news is that her front paw is infected."

The vet then looked at Henry's distantly calculating expression, "Part of her arm here looks broken too. I'd like to take an x-ray, but I'm afraid that the only thing to do at this point is to amputate the arm. Antibiotics won't work fast enough and it's already too far gone, I wouldn't want it spreading anywhere else like the lungs or heart. You got insurance?"

"Not for pets," Henry admitted. The vet nodded without commenting. Henry had money in the bank that he was stashing away; donations from anonymous strangers wishing to help him back on his feet after he had emerged beaten and bloody from room 302 and the media took hold of his situation, extra money as a springboard from his parents when he was moving, and parts of his paycheck that he was able to put away. When the vet gave him the estimate he figured he was barely able to pay it—so long as his car didn't decide to break anytime soon.

Two days later he returned to the vet's office. The kitten had stayed there for the surgery and the recuperation. When Henry saw her again her left arm was cut just below the elbow, mended into a fleshy stump. Black stitches marked the left over scar. Pity swirled deep in his gut, and as the kitten deliriously awoke and snapped her eyes to him the pity turned into a stone. Yes, he felt like he had been in a similar situation before. He poked a careful finger through the cage. The kitten flinched away and only stared at it oddly.

Henry thanked the vet and took the kitten back to his apartment. The superintendent knocked on his door soon after he got back, wanting to know how the kitten was doing and bringing a small, inexpensive toy for her to play with. She casually reminded him of the deadline again before leaving.

Henry didn't know what to do. None of his co-workers could take the cat even if they wanted her, and some of them still were interested but shunned the idea that the kitten was missing a leg. Somehow he wished he had the guts to berate them for it, but he didn't push it.

That left him with precisely nobody he could call to bring the cat to that was worth the trip. Henry stared at the kitten as it pawed the toy around. There would've been one person he would've bet could and would take the kitten at a moment's notice, but they...they were long gone.

Sighing, Henry planned to take the kitten to the shelter before the final day.

He had fallen asleep on the couch, a rare but not unheard of occurrence. Sometimes he would work himself up so much that he couldn't bear to move from his spot—he knew the room around him was safe but what if the bedroom was infested with ghosts or monsters? Normally that would've been a ridiculous, child-like way to think, but after the trauma of being thrown into an alternate world where ghosts and monsters reigned supreme from his own apartment, room 302, it happened much more often than he would like to admit.

Sometime in the middle of the night he felt something press up against his neck and jaw. Waking up with a scream, he scrambled up until he was almost sitting on top of the couch before he noticed the small ball of brown fur clutching the side of the couch cushion. His sudden movement had knocked the kitten off him and almost off the couch after it had somehow clambered up. Henry tried to force his racing heartbeat to calm down as he gently lowered himself back onto the couch, cupping the cat in his hands. They almost dwarfed the kitten. _Runt of the litter_, the vet mentioned as he was inspecting her. The kitten mewled curiously and reached a paw out, barely scraping his lips.

In that moment where his heart was still racing, the room was dark, and the only thing he could really make out was the kitten's big eyes, something clicked in his head. A strange familiarity seemed to wrap itself around the kitten and, though he would call himself crazy later, the expression in the eyes was as recognizable to him as a next-door neighbor.

Feeling stupefied, Henry relaxed his tense muscles. At any other time in his life he wouldn't be so quick to suggest the supernatural, but this was too uncanny for his mind to pass on. Hell, even the kitten's left arm was useless—practically gone—just like her left arm in his last memories of her.

And even their eyes were similar.

Henry laid back down, mystified. The kitten rubbed against his shoulder and purred, hitting his face lightly with her tail as she turned around.

Sure, maybe it was stupid, superstitious and idiotic. Henry laid still as the kitten climbed onto his chest, momentarily rubbing her face against his coarse stubble before settling down and curling into a tight ball on his chest.

Henry signed the form the first chance he got after dawn broke, trying to ignore the superintendent's tired smile.

Eileen.

He was going to call the kitten Eileen.


	2. Frigid

_I proofread this poorly, I can tell. I'm recuperating from having all of my wisdom teeth extracted at once. Vicodin does shit to me, man, i'm probably still feeling the after effects and it's been hours since that pill wore off._

* * *

**Frigid**

Henry was not used to having someone—or something else—in the apartment. For a while in his life the only other inhabitants he would expect in his apartment were malicious ghosts that were trying to worm their way into room 302. When he briefly lived with his parents they were so silent and tended to their own individual needs that Henry barely saw or spoke to them as he searched for a new place to live.

This kitten was another world entirely.

Henry had never had a pet growing up. Sometimes he would get paid to feed and walk the neighbor's dog, and one of his aunts lived on a farm, but that was about as close as he ever got to experiencing what it was like to own a pet. It wasn't long before he kept helpful web pages up on his computer, nervously glancing as Eileen padded about the apartment, rolling, stretching, shedding, clawing, and occasionally biting. There was a saving grace in that she couldn't really sharpen her claws very well as she was missing half of her leg, but it still caught Henry by surprise. She seemed to fall into a perpetually perky state without that much recuperation after her major surgery, and all of that energy fell straight to exploration and terrifying the hell out of her owner.

During the night she prowled about, knocking things over or otherwise making a tiny ruckus that would rock him from his sleep and to his feet. The first thing to his mind was _never_ that he had a rampaging kitten and was _moreso_ inclined to believe that his apartment was being invaded by the Other World again. More than once he had crept about his dark apartment in the night, hugging the walls and gripping whatever measly weapon he could find—from flimsy yardstick to ceramic lamp (sometimes with it still plugged in because he was in such a panic to see what the noise was). Almost always Eileen would mew curiously at him, causing him to squint and see her small form staring at him wondrously from the dark. Usually then he'd sigh, pat her on the head if she was close enough, then go back to bed, leaving the door open lest she prodded, meowed, or clawed against it in protest.

After two weeks Henry had begun to wonder whether or not his impulse decision was a good thing. Sure, the kitten had adjusted well to the litter box and was otherwise a relatively quiet pet—no complaints from the neighbors—but the cat had turned his apartment life upside down. As he paced about the small space she would leap from unseen corner, lashing out at his pant legs to chew ferociously on his shoelaces—or his socks, whichever he was wearing. Almost always he would cry out in shock in a decided overreaction to normal kitten play, but he couldn't help the primal belief that he was moments away from being attacked (or eaten) whenever her tiny claws attempted to pierce his skin.

At _least_ once he had almost kicked the kitten to the ceiling on accidental reflex, catching himself with his leg in midair before the kitten flung off, Eileen hanging by claws and teeth and mewing in a confused and scared manner until he unhooked her from his pant leg.

Henry needed a break, but it wasn't coming anytime soon.

Wedding season was in full-swing, causing his freelance work to momentarily skyrocket. The more he did, the more he slept through Eileen's nighttime rambles; the more he moved around, the more he easily danced around her ambushes. Becoming quite agile around the kitten, he soon found himself avoiding her in the morning and too exhausted to play with her in the evening, much to the kitten's hidden dismay.

One morning Henry was somehow successfully juggling cereal, a bowl, a spoon, and his cell phone in his small kitchen, making hasty arrangements with a client as he set up his breakfast. He awkwardly closed the fridge with his foot as he weaseled the milk out of the door, thanking the client and hanging up.

If nothing else for the entire day, Eileen was always doing figure-eights around his legs in the morning, happy to see him awake and eager to be fed herself. After a few minutes of silence and Henry poured the cereal a click went off in his head.

He couldn't hear Eileen purr, and he sure as hell wasn't feeling her small body rubbing up against his ankles.

"Eileen?" he called out quietly, his mouth full of cereal. Gulping it down and wiping his mouth, he stood on his tiptoes and peered over his small apartment.

"Eileen? Where are you?"

Pausing in the middle of his own breakfast, he took out her own food and filled her dish—even being a little generous. But Eileen didn't show her face. A slow fear ate away at his stomach, and as he left his cereal to grow soggy on the counter to search for her it started to become wretched. He had felt this kind of fear before—searching for a woman with the same name whom had gone missing from his sight and protection.

Henry began to tear his room apart. Dropping to his knees and searching under every piece of furniture, calling and making kissing noises constantly, and even opening the windows and peering fearfully downwards.

Nowhere.

Slamming the window shut, Henry felt his breaths quicken and his heart race. Panic blurred the edge of his vision. Desperately trying to keep it at bay, he rubbed the bridge of his nose fiercely, gnawing on his lower lip. He couldn't hear or see her. He _knew_ she was about him as he got up; he remembered her skittering away from the water that dripped from his body as he stepped out of the shower.

A flash of red interrupted his train of thought and he choked as pain laced his forehead. A horrible vision flitted through his mind—a disgusting fridge, a bloody pair of jeans, a lump of furry flesh within—and just as quickly as it had come it was gone.

Henry's eyes flew open and he bounded to the fridge, opening the door.

"Eileen!"

She tumbled out from the bottom shelf, dazed and unhappy.

"How did you get in there?" Henry gaped, picking the kitten up and placing her carefully on the counter. She shook her head and mewed at him, blinking deliriously. Rubbing her with his warm hands, Henry slowly forced himself to breathe normally again.

"I should get you a bell...," he muttered, brushing back her velvety ears and watching them spring back to attention.

Leaving her in a bundle of blankets (as he had yet to get her a proper bed) and a dish of warm water, Henry left for his next appointment. He tried not to think about what would've happened to her had he not thought to look in the fridge, and he tried _even more_ to forget about the reason _why_ he thought to look in the fridge.

The last wedding he was asked to do came to a close, sending a poor, tired Henry home in the middle of the night. Shuffling to bed without turning on any of the lights and only putting on half of his pajamas he collapsed into a slumber that he was certain he wouldn't wake from until the sun was at its highest in the sky the next day.

Then he heard whimpering. It slowly drew him out of his sleep until he awoke roughly. Turning around on the bed, he saw that in his delirium he had forgotten to leave his bedroom door open. Groaning as he stood up, he opened the door and mumbled Eileen's name to call her to the room. She continued to whimper as though she didn't hear him. Exasperated, Henry stepped into the small hallway.

There, in the middle of the floor, was Eileen, curling and twisting over herself violently. Henry stared, mystified and scared as he watched the kitten wrench itself in awkward directions, whimpering and whining as it did so as though against its will. She had made similar movements before, but it was always in play, and she _never _sounded so in pain like she did now.

"Eileen," he called louder, "Eileen?"

Henry wrapped his big hands around the kitten and it jerked in surprise with a pitiful yowl. Henry flinched, keeping the small ball of fur between his palms.

"Eileen, what's going on here? What happened?" Righting the kitten so it could look at him, he tried to examine her eyes in the darkness, "Are you all right?"

Eileen whimpered, her ears flat and her tail curled between her legs.

A meow, deeper than Eileen's and not from her mouth, bounced off the walls of the apartment. Henry felt his heart sink into his stomach. Frightened by the noise, Eileen jumped and frantically curled herself between Henry's knees, desperate to get away. Picking up his kitten, Henry slowly backed into his room. Fumbling with the nightstand as Eileen's tiny body was wracked with pain in his hand, he fished out a long, pure white candle with a bloody red inscription. Keeping the kitten close to his heartbeat, he ventured back out into the hallway, easing his way to the kitchen. The deeper cat yowled again, causing Eileen to squeak in fear.

"It's all right," Henry said soothingly though his voice trembled, "I've seen this before."

Carefully he opened the fridge, seeing the all-too-familiar lump of flesh stare at him with a bloody stump for a head. The candle in his hand flared to life as he set it down in front of the flesh. The lump yowled and Eileen shrieked in pain as a response. Henry felt his fingers close protectively over the cat.

"I hope this is a dream," he whispered hoarsely as he watched the lump of flesh disintegrate with the candle. Eileen shivered against him.

Dazed, he closed the fridge when everything had disappeared and shuffled back to bed, wide-eyed and kitten in hand. Placing her carefully on the bed before clambering in after her, he gazed at the kitten, wrapped tightly in her own tail and still trembling from the lump of flesh from the fridge.

Reaching out a finger to lightly stroke her chest, he spoke to the kitten quietly.

"Did you see it coming? Was that why I found you in the fridge this morning?"

The kitten gazed at him as though it was frustrated with itself for failing to make him understand. Or maybe he was reading into its green eyes too deeply.

"I'm sorry," he apologized, "Talking to you like this, thinking you're more than a cat...,"

Eileen batted his finger.

"I'll be here now, just nine-to-five work for a while. No more weddings."

She seemed to ignore him. Henry sighed, and tiredly moved his finger to the soft fuzz of her stubby arm. Eileen flinched away, sitting on her hind legs before pouncing on his finger and biting. Henry let her.

"I'll pay more attention to you is what I'm saying," Henry explained quietly, "Hopefully...we won't be haunted again."

The kitten released his finger and Henry sniffed, dismissing his one-sided conversation with a cat as he rolled over to fall asleep.

Eileen watched him, her tail swishing back and forth. After a while she started to purr softly, climbing carefully onto his pillow and nestling herself against the thick hair on the back of his head.

Henry felt as though he was forgiven, but the circumstances that led up to the forgiveness troubled his sleep for the rest of the week.


End file.
